Townscapes

I am finally coming around to reading Richard Ford's masterpiece, The Sportswriter. Better late than never! My only other experience with Ford is a heartbreaking excerpt in The New Yorker from The Lay of the Land, which I will read in-full as the last installment in his Frank Bascombe trilogy. That should be right around the beginning of next spring.

Every word, every sentence is a revelation. It is not surprising how much the precarious mind of a midlife divorced male is of interest to me (there are a few in my life). What stuns me is his firm grip on physical-emotional juxtaposition -- the relevance of place as it pertains to feelings from one minute to the next.

His passages on the details of his small town enthrall me:

A town, almost any town, would seem to have secrets all its own. Though if you believed that you'd be wrong. Haddam in fact is as straightforward and plumb-literal as a fire hydrant, which more than anything else makes it the pleasant place it is.

None of us could stand it if every place were a grizzled Chicago or a bilgy Los Angeles--towns, like Gotham, of genuine woven intricacy. We all need our simple, unambiguous, even factitious townscapes like mine. Places without challenge or double-ranked complexity.

Of course his protagonist's life is anything but simple, and that is the point. And as a newly ensconced resident in this town, I have to argue against the perceived lack of complexity. During the span of two months that I've been here, discourse has been anything but light. It is ironic to me that the sheer literalness of my stripped-down existence here is confronted by some of the greatest social olympics I've ever endured--at least not since my first days of college.

This past weekend was a marathon of "deep conversation." And a large part of the dialogue directly addressed the difficulty of presenting oneself at all authentically. Arriving here I was offered the opportunity, in a way, to start fresh. Begin a new chapter with a newly polished persona. But to successfully achieve this requires a fairly clear sense of previous chapters and their cumulative effect. The narrative leading up to this fork in the road.

I leave it here for now until I can better collect my thoughts.